Series of meetings organised by the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society
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This is the programme of Oxford C.C.S. public meetings for January – March 2018.
The meetings will take place every Thursday and be held at the Mitre pub, High St (upstairs function room), Oxford OX1 4AG from 7:30pm to 9:30pm.
Each meeting will consist of a short talk of around twenty minutes followed by questions and discussion.
The full schedule is as follows:
Week 1: Thursday 18 January What makes chemistry so boring?
Week 2: Thursday 25 January Bitcoin: tulips from cyberspace (speaker: Adam Buick)
Week 3: Thursday 1 February The golden hammer: Druidism and its class background
Week 4: Thursday 8 February Marxism and gender identity
Week 5: Thursday 15 February The gates of mercy in arbitrary space: the National Health state
Week 6: Thursday 22 February The dream of human life: art in the Italian Renaissance
Week 7: Thursday 1 March The political economy of neural networks
Week 8: Thursday 8 March Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) and the road to power
i Chemistry boring for Marxists? Whether 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 20 coats or = x coats – that is, whether a given quantity of linen is worth few or many coats, every such statement implies that the linen and coats, as magnitudes of value, are expressions of the same unit, things of the same kind. Linen = coat is the basis of the equation.But the two commodities whose identity of quality is thus assumed, do not play the same part. It is only the value of the linen that is expressed. And how? By its reference to the coat as its equivalent, as something that can be exchanged for it. In this relation the coat is the mode of existence of value, is value embodied, for only as such is it the same as the linen. On the other hand, the linen’s own value comes to the front, receives independent expression, for it is only as being value that it is comparable with the coat as a thing of equal value, or exchangeable with the coat. To borrow an illustration from chemistry, butyric acid is a different substance from propyl formate. Yet both are made up of the same chemical substances, carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O), and that, too, in like proportions – namely, C4H8O2. If now we equate butyric acid to propyl formate, then, in the first place, propyl formate would be, in this relation, merely a form of existence of C4H8O2; and in the second place, we should be stating that butyric acid also consists of C4H8O2. Therefore, by thus equating the two substances, expression would be given to their chemical composition, while their different physical forms would be neglected.If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm In chemistry the absolute atomic weights of the various elements are also not known to us. But we know them relatively, inasmuch as we know their reciprocal relations. Hence, just as commodity production and its economics obtain a relative expression for the unknown quantities of labour contained in the various commodities, by comparing these commodities on the basis of their relative labour content, so chemistry obtains a relative expression for the magnitude of the atomic weights unknown to it by comparing the various elements on the basis of their atomic weights, expressing the atomic weight of one element in multiples or fractions of the other (sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen). And just as commodity production elevates gold to the level of the absolute commodity, the general equivalent of all other commodities, the measure of all values, so chemistry promotes hydrogen to the rank of the chemical money commodity, by fixing its atomic weight at 1 and reducing the atomic weights of all other elements to hydrogen, expressing them in multiples of its atomic weight. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch26.htm
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